Catchin Air

These guys are having a pretty good time. As did we, working on the sound design. And we stayed relatively dry doing it. Mostly.

Greatest Tank Battles

War is hell.
But creating sound design for war? Well, that's just fun as hell. For the Military Channel's series "Greatest Tank Battles" we've been blowing a lot of stuff up.


We're having a great time doing it, but we take it seriously! We aim for creating a mix of authentic tank- and ordinance-specific sounds as well as some more Hollywood style effects to get you as close to the action as you'll ever want to be. This episode is on the battle of El Alamein in WWII.

UPDATE: Wildwater Wins at Salem and Kendal!

UPDATE: WildWater wins top prize - "Best Adventure Film" - at Kendal Mountain Fest (one of the "Big 4" in the genre) - including a specific shout out for the "meticulous" attention to sound design!

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Congrats to our friends at FORGE Motion Pictures - their film "Wildwater" won Best Short Film at the Salem Film Festival. Kip created some custom music for the film's score, and Greg did some wicked sound design, driven by his own experience as a white water junkie. Mixed in glorious 5.1 surround sound by part-time Couper and full-time cool guy Kelly Garry along with Supervising Mixer Ed Kaufman.

WildWater Ecuador Teaser from Anson Fogel on Vimeo.

Cold Blooded!

You can bet we had a good time doing the sound design work on this sick little number for Discovery Networks...

The theatrical release of the summer!

Finally, it has arrived. The cinematic event of the year:
The 2010 Coupe Studios Commercial Demo Reel. Also included at no additional cost to you is a little tour of our fine facility! With the help of a Steadi-Cam guy and an video editor whom we suspect of sleeping in a closet in the studio, we put together our Magnum Opus for your viewing (and hearing) pleasure.

Transformers!

More than meets the ear...
The sounds of explosions and robots have been filling the halls here as of late. Here's the result:
www.bktransformers.com/
A tie-in cross promotion site for Burger King and the new Transformers movie. We had an absolute blast doing the sound design for this bad boy...

Ad Music...

Check out the link from Cactus's blog (purethinking.typepad.com) to an interesting article on AdAge about songs in advertising. Now, bear in mind that the piece doesn't cover any original music - only pop songs that have been licensed or re-recorded for the ads. There's certainly a time and a place for that - (Like the remake of The Carpenters "Come On Get Happy" we recently did for a national TV campaign), but for our money, there's something to be said for having an original song scored just for your ad.
Peep a couple of these we've done:

McDonalds Radio - Break for Breakfast

Victory Motorcycles

While you're on a roll - cruise over to our website for some mo!

Lost Season Finale

Did you catch the 18-hour Lost season finale last night? You probably TiVO'd through a bunch of commercials we produced, but you also heard some of our work during the show. We worked with Josh Holloway (Sawyer) doing some ADR for several episodes this year, and most recently he was in last week to work on the season finale - just before it aired.

Visit our website at coupestudios.com for more of our work...

What the hell is ADR, you ask?
Here's how our friends at Wikipedia explain it:

Automated dialogue replacement or Additional dialogue recording (ADR) is a film sound technique involving the re-recording of dialogue after photography, also known as "looping."

In conventional film production, a production sound mixer records dialogue during photography, but several uncontrollable issues, such as traffic or animal noise, during principal photography can cause the production sound to be unusable. This is also true for computer-generated imagery, since some of the "actors" were not actually present at the set.

When the film is in post-production, a Supervising Sound Editor or ADR Supervisor reviews all of the dialogue in the film and rules which actor lines will have to be replaced using the ADR technique.

ADR is recorded during an ADR session. An actor, usually the original actor on set, is called to a sound studio equipped with video playback equipment and sound playback and recording equipment. The actor wears headphones and is shown the film of the line that must be replaced, and often he or she will be played the production sound recording. The film is then projected several times, and the actor attempts to re-perform the line while watching the image on the screen, while an ADR Recordist records the performances. Several takes are made, and based on the quality of the performance and sync, one is selected and edited by an ADR Editor for use in the film.